ScanSnap iX500 Scanner is a Lightning Fast, Dependable Way to Get Organized

Like many people this time of year, I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to New Year’s Resolutions. And, like many people this time of year, two things are at the top of my list: Getting better organized and losing weight.

Believe it or not, Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX500 helped me do both. With it, I was able to turn a mass of receipts, statements and other documents into a well-organized collection of PDFs. It also helped me get rid of an unsightly 20 pounds.

Of paper, that is.

For someone like me, used to using flatbed scanners, the ScanSnap is a remarkable piece of machinery. Put a stack of documents in the feeder at the top, press a single button and watch them come flying out — so fast, in fact, that I first thought the scanner was simply rejecting the pages and spitting them out.

Fujitsu says the iX500 scans at a rate of 25 pages per minute — and scans both sides of the page at the same time. It can accommodate different size documents in the feeder at the same time: receipts, credit card and bank statements, tax forms, etc. In our testing, the scanner performed nearly flawlessly — it jammed only once, on a badly crumpled page.

Speaking of Resolution

The ScanSnap has a resolution of up to 600 dpi in color or greyscale and up to 1200 dpi in black and white, although you can choose lower resolutions to save file space. it saves files in either PDF or JPG format. It folds compactly and discreetly and has a energy saving mode that means you can keep it on and at the ready, turning on only when needed. Its ScanSnap Manager program runs in the background until needed. The scanner is so compact, it takes up far less room on my desk than the piles of paper it helped eliminate.

The ScanSnap connects to your Mac via an included USB cable and by default scans documents directly onto your Mac, into whatever location you choose in the bundled application.

The iX500 also supports wireless scanning to your iPhone or iPad. It creates its own wireless connection directly with your mobile device, bypassing the Mac and your home network completely. Like the scanner itself, the mobile scanning feature works flawlessly, sending crisp scans to my iPad that looked more like electronic documents than scanned images.

Scan it Your Way

Fujitsu’s bundled software provides a slew of different options. In addition to scanning documents to your Mac via USB, you can scan to cloud services like Dropbox, Evernote, Google Docs, etc. (ScanSnap uses your Mac as the conduit for this, copying files to the appropriate location on your hard drive; it doesn't send the files directly to those services.) You can send scans to your printer, too (again, via your Mac rather than a direct connection to the printer) essentially turning the ScanSnap into a high quality copy machine.

If you prefer, you can have your scans open immediately in applications like Adobe Acrobat or Microsoft Word. The program will also scan and prepare documents and attach them to an email for you.

You can even scan into competitors’ software, so if you prefer Neat, for instance, the ScanSnap won’t take offense. Choosing between all these options is made easy via a contextual menu that appears when you click the application’s icon in the Dock. The included software can also convert your scans into searchable PDFs using its built-in optical character recognition capability.

That ability is nice to have, because even with all these features, it’s on the software side that the ScanSnap falls just a little short. Rather than using OS X’s native open and save dialogue windows, ScanSnap Manager uses its own, rather clunky interface that makes naming files and navigating to folders a little cumbersome.

But I Can Quit Anytime I Want

Still, the quibbles with its software seem minor when compared to the rock star performance of the iX500 itself. I found the act of scanning and shredding my small mountain of accumulated paperwork to be absolutely addicting, and once I got into a rhythm, I was turning years of useless paper into searchable, organized information. Having that kind of electronic access to statements and receipts allowed me to look at trends, spot inconsistencies and gain a much better handle on my data.

Like dieting, the hardest part about getting organized with the ScanSnap was getting started. It’s been easy (and fun) to keep up with the paper that’s come in since.

At about US$450, the ScanSnap iX500 isn’t cheap, but if you’re tired of drowning in a sea of paper that you can’t use but are afraid to toss out, it’s well worth the price.

The Bottom Line

With its amazingly fast and dependable hardware, Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX500 has made getting organized a resolution that I’m sure I’ll be able to keep long after my New Year’s decorations have been put away.

The scansnaps, both the 1300 and this 1500 get a lot of bad reviews on Amazon. Lot’s of people bought them after reading the bad reviews, only to write a bad review later telling how stupid they were. In theory, they sound great, but if you get one that’s screwing up, you’re going to hate it. The odds don’t look good enough to spend that kind of money on one… oh, and the 1300 costs half as much, is slightly slower, but doesn’t have any worse reviews than the 1500. Both have 20+ bad reviews with the 1500 being worse. go figure!

I see 670 positive reviews for the iX500 on Amazon (590 of them are five-star ratings) and 34 negative reviews (one or two stars). That gives it about a 95% positive rating if I did my math correctly.

A good number of the one-star ratings seem like they were made punitively for very specific things like lack of Twain support or another single issue that probably wouldn’t affect most users. Most negative reviews involving performance of the scanner itself came from April or earlier, indicating to me that perhaps there was a production or firmware issue that was later resolved. Even so, that seems like a pretty good percentage of positive reviews to me—I certainly wouldn’t characterize it as “a lot of bad reviews.”

For reasons having nothing to do with the product, I took far longer than normal to review the ScanSnap, so I had more than sufficient time to evaluate it. Other than the one jam on crumpled paper that I noted in my review, the scanner performed flawlessly, as it did for the vast majority of owners who left ratings on Amazon.

You should, of course, buy the scanner you feel is best for you, but I stand by the 4.5 stars I gave the ScanSnap. I put it through its paces and was intentionally rough on it. It earned the review it got and I continue to recommend it to anyone serious about organizing the paper in their life.